I work in the Tools group at a developer large enough to now have the early next gen PS and XBX dev kits.
- The Sony inserts made a big deal about their high-speed storage, and they included a demo of Spider-Man that I assume is the same one that Cerny referenced. We have our own game data asset “loading/streaming” stress test, and we ran this for both dev kits. The PS showed a major performance advantage of approximately 30% faster loading until the highest resolution textures were enabled, which brought the performance down much closer to what the XBX showed. While they both have SSDs, it does seem that the PS may have some special magic or “sauce” to gain some additional advantage here.
- Sony also mentioned next gen audio in their inserts and included some sample demos. Whatever they are doing here does sound and almost “feel” like next gen Sonrisa The audio demo included a toggle to enable/disable RT.
- The Xbox inserts mentioned an architectural focus (combination of hardware/software) for RT, AI and frame rate. The only sample demo application provided appears to be an updated version of that ‘Insects’ demo that they released for the Xbox One X. I have to admit that this little demo is pretty crazy what the lighting and shadows look like in this.
- We ran our internal demo stress test application (think ridiculous number of graphic and physics effects being applied) against both dev kits, attempting to target 60 fps. Both seemed to be the same locked 60 performance at 1080p and 1440p. XBX showed a performance difference at 4K on our test at least. It was able to maintain a nearly locked 60 with only an occasional dip, with the PS in the low 50s.
- We also have a DirectX 12 specific performance test that we run and profile using the Microsoft PIX. The XBX was able to render at 4K resolution with nearly locked 60 fps for a demo that we have run with wildly inconsistent results using even the more powerful current desktop graphic cards.